Behind the Harris Campaign's Search for the Mythical 'Cheney Democrats'

The Democratic consulting class – the immortal swamp creatures of DC – always seem to have only one idea: pitch their campaign to the political center. In 2024, that means trying to win over the so-called “Cheney Democrats” – whatever the hell that means. This strategy apparently requires ignoring your base on domestic issues and terrible it on foreign policy by financing the Israeli genocide. In our polarized political moment, this is electoral suicide.

The Harris-Walz ticket is running a campaign based on the fantasy that there is a centrist wing of the GOP that is appalled by Donald Trump. For this to work, Trump would have to be an outlier and a significant portion of Republicans would have to look for an alternative.

Those sensible Republicans are gone, if they ever existed. Liz Cheney lost her re-election campaign (against a Trumpist stooge) by 30 points, the second-largest defeat of a sitting member of Congress in US history. The modern GOP base is proudly nativist and out for blood. Republican politicians don't offer health care or higher wages. Instead, they are spending this election season mocking a pogrom against a small Haitian community in the Midwest. (Former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, once sharply rebuked for praising Strom Thurmond's segregationist campaign for the White House, is not punished in today's GOP, but promoted.) Republicans would rather gargle with kerosene than their own To question racism and sexism to vote for Kamala Harris. Some of these people may have been Obama voters, but if they haven't already become Democrats, they certainly won't vote for any of them now.

Many of the same people who were screaming for joy – yes, for joy! – when Biden resigned and Harris and Walz took office, they are now backing away. Harris needs the base to turn out, and we already know that weaponizing Israeli genocide is losing Harris votes, especially in battleground states like Michigan. Young people will stay home or vote third-party because they are told there are no choices for them to change morally abhorrent policies in the Middle East. In Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania, about 35 percent of Democratic voters say they would be more likely to vote for the Democratic candidate if the person supported an arms embargo, compared to being less likely to vote, according to a poll in August only 5 percent carried out by the Institute for Middle Eastern Understanding. And in an October poll of Arab Americans, considered the most likely voters, Trump leads Harris 46-42.

I have no doubt that the Harris-Walz team knows that they are alienating many young people and Arab-American voters. And we now know that Biden is saying privately what so many critics have said publicly: that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is rejecting a ceasefire and starting a regional war in part to hand the presidency to Trump. And yet a democratic government still arms him. Netanyahu is humiliating Biden for the world to see, and Harris will not deviate from Biden's Israel policy. In the face of such obvious nonsense, the Harris campaign insists on sticking its chin out.

This is not incompetence. As Dan Denvir from the podcast The excavation tweeted: “What we are seeing is not so much that Democratic Party elites are ignoring the anti-war demands of their voters, but rather a coordinated response against the party's anti-war base.” They want to silence and demobilize their base so that the party elites can unite “We can wage endless Israeli war abroad.”

It is a betrayal of every person who fears another Trump term and ensures that it never happens. The Harris campaign is angering its base by refusing to take positions that could cost it crucial votes at the Cheney compound in Wyoming or at fundraisers on the Upper East Side.

There is another campaign that could have been run, one that the Democratic Party may not be cut out for: one that broke away early from Biden on the Palestine issue, one that opposed the execution of Marcellus Williams, one who didn't run to the right on immigration, which opens the door for Trump/Vance to make the issue even angrier. It's easy to blame her campaign manager — an Uber VP and DC technocrat, David Plouffe — for trying to robotically triangulate Harris' positions. The campaign is clearly afraid of angering Zionists – both Jewish and Christian – and raising people's expectations with a bold economic vision. They play prevention defense instead of going on offense. They hope that Trump says enough crazy things and that Vance makes more people hate the sight of him and that they win. Walz, the former defensive coordinator, should know that prevent defense only prevents you from winning. This is a base choice. And the Harris-Walz campaign feels completely wrong.